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Sunday April 17

Ray Kluun is a young Dutchman who slept around while his wife was at home dying from cancer. This might have remained a matter for him and his conscience if he had not then written a book about a young Dutchman who sleeps around while his wife is dying from cancer. In Kluun’s case one of the partners became a serious and long-term lover. So too with the man in his book.

“I’m not proud of what I did,” he says, referring to his infidelity, “but when you have to give all your energy to something like this, in a part of your life when you should be having fun; ­ when you turn from a man into a nurse having to support someone physically, mentally, emotionally, then something else drops out. If all this positive energy is going out towards someone else, then an existing black side of you comes up. A guy I know collected stamps. When his wife got cancer, he became obsessed with stamp-collecting, and he never cheated on his wife. You always use your escape route. My weakness had been nightlife and women.”

All of a sudden her face grows taut. ‘Isn’t it time to tell Luna I soon won`t be here?’

‘I’ve already prepared her for that a little bit this morning.’

‘And what did she say?`

‘That’ – gulp – ‘it was OK if it meant you aren’t in pain any more and you don’t have to be sick.’ Together we cry over our little ray of sunshine.

`Feeling a bit better?’ I ask after a while. She nods. ‘Shall I read out the emails you’ve got?’ She nods again. Like a real star, she replies to her fans. Like a real secretary I type in the answers Carmen dictates.

I find Mr Kluun’s story very reassuring. I find it such a confusing thing to be living in a society where people do dreadful and deceitful things while maintaining the illusion that they are someone ‘perfect’ and ‘respectable’…. I think Mr Kluun and his wife probably experienced something in their time together that many couple I know seem to lack entirely- an honesty and an ability to talk together openly about the things about each other that were good, as well as bad.

Monday April 18

Ever since his 1994 movie “Rice People” introduced a Cambodian voice to world cinema, the director Rithy Panh has become the conscience of a nation still haunted by the tragedy of its recent past. “From the beginning I knew my work would focus on the problems in my country,” Panh said. “It’s been 26 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge, yet we still don’t fully understand why we were forced to live through these horrors.”

“Most of these men still don’t understand how they became killers,” Panh said. “It’s not simply a question of judgment. We need to find answers to these questions. “Pol Pot is dead, but so far not a single person has been tried or convicted for crimes committed during that period. ”

“We have no recorded images of the genocide,” he said. “If we don’t confront the past, we will lose these essential memories; which is why I encourage people to tell their stories. The Khmer Rouge tried to destroy our culture and our identity, but it could never be simply a process of erasing something from a blackboard.”

Tuesday April 19

Read a review of The Best of Youth, screenplay by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli

From a summer day in Roma in 1966 to a winter night in Norway in 2003, Best of Youth chronicles some 40 years in the lives of the Carati family and their friends. Over the course of six riveting hours, Giordana weaves a delicate tapestry of human ecstasy and misery, paralleling the ups and downs of a family with the rise and fall of a country. Italy unravels and so do its people. Best of Youth is about the search for a national and personal identity and everything that happens to the Carati family becomes an act of self-preservation. Yes, Best of Youth is talky, but it’s also unmistakably, blisteringly human.

Sandro Petraglia, “The Best of Youth” is not only the title of a collection of Friulian poetry by Pasolini, it is also a tragic song of the mountain people as they were going to die in war. The meaning of the title (typically romantic) is also a way of mocking the definition of the “best”, which basically says not to be so sure … A strong belief of “baby boomers” born after the war is that you want to stay young forever. Jim Morrison of The Doors said, I hope I die before I get old. This generation has never said “everything that is real is rational, ” but: everything that is real is not right and must be changed. This path naturally involves many mistakes: only he who stands still is never wrong.

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Wednesday April 20

Alfasi: Glasgow is a rough city. And the area we moved in was rougher still. And we were the only Muslims. And the only non-white Scottish. I was the first to wear a hijab in school. And coupled with not being able to afford a uniform at that time as well — we also had to wear frilly dresses. That completed the look. But the great thing was, after I didn’t change, through taunting, they respected me for who I was. And I learned something great from that.

Friday April 22

“Miss Simonova drew a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears …. She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.”